The Census Bureau used both central processing and headquarters staff to check returned
questionnaires, capture data, and implement quality control procedures. Questionnaires
that had a preliminary classification of a complete interview were submitted to a series of
computer edits consisting of a range check, a consistency edit, and a blanking edit.6 After
these edits were run and reviewed by analysts, the records were put through another edit
to make a final determination as to whether the case was eligible for the survey and
whether sufficient data had been collected for the case to be classified as a complete
interview.

After the final edits were run, cases with "not-answered" values for items remained.
Values were imputed using a two stage process. In the first stage, items were imputed
with a valid response using data either from the sample frame, other items in the same
SASS questionnaire, or another questionnaire associated with the same school or school
district. In addition, data were ratio adjusted in some circumstances so that items were
consistent with one another. In the second stage, donor-respondent methods, such as hot-deck
imputation, were used. If no suitable donor case could be matched, the few
remaining items were imputed with a mean or mode from groups of similar cases. After
each stage of imputation, computer edits were run again to verify that the imputed data
were consistent with the existing questionnaire data. If that was not the case, an imputed
value was blanked out by one of these computer edits due to inconsistency with other
data within the same questionnaire or because it was out of the range of acceptable
values. In these situations, Census Bureau analysts looked at the items and tried to
determine an appropriate value. Imputation flags, indicating which imputation method was used, were assigned to each imputed survey variable. For further information, see the section on data processing and imputation in the Documentation for the 2007–08 Schools and Staffing Survey (Tourkin et al. forthcoming).

6 Blanking edits delete answers to questions that should not have been filled in (e.g., if a respondent followed a wrong skip pattern).